Mesh Ethernet designs
Tuesday Nov 07, 2006
Simons Networking Blog, lead me to this excelent Network World article:
What's the biggest, fastest LAN switch?
This isn't a trick question, but one with a lot of tricky answers depending on how you define "big" and "fast.">
Ethernet switch vendors such as 3Com, Force10, Cisco, Extreme, Foundry and HP ProCurve constantly tussle with claims of the highest performance, density and latency. But keep in mind that what's available right now from such vendors is three-year-old technology, on average. Meanwhile, a host of hungry start-ups such as Raptor Networks and Woven Systems have a new take on how to build the "biggest" Ethernet switch. Their approach diverges from single big-iron chassis, and more resembles clustered supercomputing, or InfiniBand networking topologies.>
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"We're looking at the next-generation machines and everything is going to go up by a factor of 10," says Dave Wiltzius, network division leader at the lab.
"Everything will be 10G. So we're looking for a switch, or switch fabric that can give us on the order of 2,000 10G ports… We're basically interested in building a federated switch environment using fat tree topologies and things like that."
[..]
The approach Woven is taking is similar to the trend of grid or distributed, clustered computing, where large, symmetric multi-processor (SMP) servers are being replaced by single- or dual-processor nodes coupled together over a network.
"The same thing is going to happen to LAN switching in the data center, with respect to scale out," Quackenboss says. "The big [LAN] switches are expensive, and the biggest non-blocking switch you can buy for data center applications is a 64-port Foundry system."
[..]
This ties in with my earlier comments on pod based grid designs. I've wondered for a while why someone doesn't make a better IB/Ethernet gateway that could be used to provide a fast, non-blocking IB based core but connected to regular Ethernet servers and switches at the edge. It will be interesting to see how fast this technology develops - Arastra and Woven Systems are worth keeping an eye on.
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